The legs off the extractors (A) never seem to have a default length. No matter the planet size, they seem to have a default length, but never the same default.
I have seen videos where the players use a honeycomb pattern (B) to arrange the extractor’s nodes. However I don’t see much improvement over the simple star pattern (C) I use for extraction.
There should be a way to locate orphaned launchpads and other items. At present, I just run a scan for the most common material on the planet. This saturates the planet in white, the item then shows up as a dark spot.
The plasma planets make it hard to see anything on your farm. They are far too bright and no amount of adjustment will aid you in seeing them any better.
I think the trick is to not leave orphaned launchpads behind in the first place.
Why would you do that?
I like the neat patterns you made in your pictures.
I never put in much effort to place my extractor heads in a neat pattern, they just need to be spread across the densest areas of the resource within range, without overlapping.
Occasionally there is a hotspot that takes three or more extractor heads, in which case I prefer the hexagonal pattern if any, because it’s the closest way to stack them.
I don’t know why anyone would need to locate the command center. Once you have the planet claimed and upgraded, it has no other purpose. There have been times where I am moving the entire farm and I decommission the farm attached to the launchpad. Then for various reasons, I end up with an empty launchpad ‘lost’ on the planet. I know it is there because of the power levels, it is just a matter of finding it again. Since I already went down that dark alley, I figure other new citizens might need the light I found.
My opinion, they could replace the home button with a button to cycle through all planetary structures. For example; first click takes you to the command center, second click to the next structure, and so on. Making the button a Find Next button instead of Home.
About the raw planetary mats and a bit about how I farm. I make an average of 1.2 B isk per 30 days before taxes. I set my farms to run on 2 accounts with 5 planets each and my Command Center Upgrade skill at maximum. I have 5 planets in one system per character, but each character has their own system to avoid any overlap in farming. I set the farms to run 3 days and only return on the 3rd day to restart or move extractors. The cost of moving an extractor is only 45,000 moving the launch pad is seldom done, but runs 900,000 when needed. I can run 2 farms per planet at my skill level.
If you are building something or working on a project with your corp, you may want to store these mats in a station, until you are ready to convert one or more planets into factories. I am a solo act, so I just sell my raw mats in Jita for a quick and dirty profit. After all 1.2 B isk per month for an AFK activity is pretty good, and frees my time for other activities.
Another consideration for selling in Jita is to set your farms up within a few jumps. Otherwise you can spend all day jumping in a hauler to Jita and back to the farm in the empty. I set some of my farms up too far away from Jita and those I either need to transport to Amarr or sell on the nearby system trade route. Location is everything.
This is not entirely afk, you’ve gotta start, regroup, haul and sell. Skipping means less income, so you have to set a timetable. It’s a job, paid in ISK.
I compare it to AFK fishing in other mmos. Of course you will need a pole and bait. but once you start you shouldn’t spend more than a 20 mins per character on this per 3 days.
Not sure what you mean by regroup? But I move farms and like I said, if you are spending much more than 20 mins per character or 1 hour per account, then you are doing it wrong.
I only haul when there is an abundance to move to Jita/Amarr or I don’t haul at all, selling it in place, on established trade route. I can offer it for less, saving me the jump time.
Not sure what you are driving at by skipping? I just got done doing all 6 characters - this is checking on 30 planets - in about two hours. Most only needed resets for the 3 days, others where the stock move away had to retask or relocate the extractor, and none of them today require the entire farm (both the extractor and launchpad) to be moved. I seldom find any need to do an entire farm, but it costs less than 1 million isk. The real loss is the taxes for moving product off planet. I try to find something between 12 to 15% on the taxes, Which means I clear about 1 B isk per month after taxes for 20 hours of monthly activity. I tried my hand at mining, it is too risky, and ties up more resources and time.
It can be done anywhere there are planets. All you need is the omega skills, buy a command center for the planet type, and place it to claim the planet. The command center is your power and cpu generator for running things on the planet.
I strongly suggest you look at the customs office description for the taxes you get charged for transfer of items. For example, the last line here shows Nani 1 to charge 7%.
However this is not a planet I farm, it is located in Pochven. High sec planets I do farm charge between 12 to 20% taxes. I haven’t found any above 20% yet, there could be, but the highest tax I am paying is 15%.
Steps
Find a system with low taxes and planets to farm
Buy your command centers, they are sold by NPCs for 81,000 each.
Place and upgrade the command center.
Use scan to find crops, place down extractors, and launchpads.
Wait for crops to harvest.
That is pretty much all I do. Some people place down factories and turn the raw mats into higher tier product. I just sell the raw at market. I learned how to start watching a youtube video.
It’s not just 20 hours, it’s 20 scheduled hours. By skipping I mean holidays, days off, hiatus, or what else makes you miss your appointed time to restart your collectors. This is the reason that sometimes makes me earn less than 1b/month.
But anyway, a fine running PI setup is producing needed goods and thus a nice source of income.
In many parts of space where you see planetary customs offices (POCO) or if in null sec space Skyhooks, you can check if you have access and get a reasonable tax rate for exporting and importing goods to the planet.
I wouldn’t set up in a place with over 15% tax.
Next, buy command centers on the market to place on the planet you wish to set up on. And once there, put extractors, storages, basic factories, set up routes for your goods, schedules to extract the right resource, the right schema for the factories to turn that extracted good into tiers higher, etc.
It is very old using the old GUI from several years ago. They lost me on step nine, when they daisy chain all those extractors and factories.
This tutorial shows 2 extractors, 2 basic factories, 1 advanced, and a Launchpad.
Extractors - 2600 MW x 2 = 5200 MW
Basic Factory - 800 MW x 2 = 1600 MW
Advanced Factory - 700 MW
Launchpad - 700 MW
Total Power ( less links ) - 8200 MW
My PI skills are all at max and I have 10,800 energy to place down 20 extractor heads, 550 MW each comes to 11,000 MW. Since we are talking about new players in the New Citizens Q&A, this tutorial should not be used by new players. It will take you a month or injectors to train up to max skills on PI, I recommend you start small and work your way up. I don’t recommend that set up even for a person who has max skill, you won’t be extracting at peak efficiency.
Once you get up to max skill, here is what I suggest you can do.
Extractors - 2600 MW x 2 = 5200 MW
Launchpad - 700 MW x 2 = 1400 MW
20 Heads - 550 MW x 20 = 11,000 MW
This leaves you with 1400 MW for the links.
Run duration of time by the total volume, until you get just under 2 million on each launchpad, they get full at 2 million.
Go play other things in EVE.
Leave the items in the launchpads.
Decommission your extractors.
Set up 2 or more* basic factories linked to the launchpads.
Run the contents of the launchpad to the factory and the factory output to return to the launch pads.
Now you wait until all the raw materials are processed into tier 1.
Pick up raw from planet to customs.
Decommission the factories and rebuild new farms.
*Note: Since each basic factory will process 3000 units of raw, that comes to 666 cycles @ 30 mins per cycle, about two weeks later. Since you don’t need all those extractor heads you now have 11,000 MW to spend. You should be able to place down 12 basic factories. This reduces the cycles down to 111, just over 2 days.
For tier 2 product and beyond, I suggest you have a factory only planet set up on some barren planet. This is where you will take your T1 materials to be processed in advanced factories.
I also didn’t care much that the author of that tutorial called users lazy for not doing PI on a daily basis. Down in step 12 they said,
if you’re lazy then you can set it to 3 days or even a week.
It is not lazy to wait for extraction. If you are running 5 planets harvesting and a 6th advance factory only, you will be busy most of the time with PI. There is no wrong way, unless you are spending too much on building and not showing a profit at the end of the month. Hmmm… that sounds a lot like a software developer we know.
I just linked it as an example guide. And now that I read through it seems to be giving better advice than whatever that strategy is you recommend.
Why would you waste effort and ISK by alternating your extractors and basic factories if you could simply put down a healthy balance of the two in the first place?
The UI is indeed old, but the mechanics haven’t changed.
At the top of the guide players are recommended to train Command Center Upgrades IV if they wish to get into PI, which takes a new player 4 days at most with bad attributes or faster with a good match, not a month.
Level 4 should unlock the second best tier command center upgrade for 17,000 MW, plenty for the buildings in that guide. Even with level 3 (17 hours) you would already have 15,000 MW which is enough to build that setup and give it a start.
It’s a tutorial to teach the basics of PI, not a tutorial for ‘peak efficiency’.
Peak efficiency also isn’t an objective thing when it comes to PI, there are many factors at play such as the availability of resources on your planets, how often you’re willing to reset, whether you’re producing P2 on a single planet or P1 etc.
Lazy PI is the best way to do PI, in my opinion.
I reset twice a week, haul once every few weeks.
The tutorial I linked isn’t entirely my current style of PI either, but it’s a decent introduction to PI and better than whatever your strategy is.
To any new players reading this:
Planetary industry is a fine balance between effort and payout.
You could put in a lot of effort rebuilding your entire planet setup every few days to chase hot spots, to keep the extraction peak of the first few hours by resetting daily or multiple times a day or do silly things like alternating factories and extractors (instead of having a healthy mix of extractors and factories that you can just let work without you rebuilding it) for some extra gains.
You could also put effort into setting up your planets once and spending far less effort maintaining it.
You’re more likely to reap profits from a planetary setup for months, years if you spend less effort on it and you’re more likely to burn out if you feel like you have to spend a lot of work on your planets throughout every week.
I vote for ‘lazy PI’.
After all, if you burn out on PI and quit doing it, you gain zero profit.
I do my PI on every 3rd day of the month 3, 6, 9…24, 27, 30. When I hit the new month I just laps one day, it is not like one day without the extractors running is going to kill me. As for off times and holidays, it goes without saying, if your not around to play, you are probably not spending either.
Not showing this to blow my horn, I want new players to see the profit from just selling the raw PI mats monthly. Out of 6 producers this is my top producer and bottom producer.
I know it looks like I am losing money because expenses are more than income. The expense is actually these 2 characters throwing the isk into a corp bank account. If you are new to this game and need to make isk as you play, get omega, learn the skills, and farm planets while you PvP.
On 6 characters, that would be 2 accounts. I am not doubting your word. The top is making 313 M plus 193 M is 506 M. That is half a billion ISK on just 2 of your characters. You really need to find out what the others are doing to make them all work like the top dog. Then you will be getting closer to 2 B per 30 days. Looks like some of your workers might be slacking there.
I should say an estimated 1.2 B isk. Some have offers in the market for 3 months. I just used the information above and added up the millions per character.
